Just days after Trump’s victory, Steve Madden is getting out of China. But there’s a catch

President-elect Donald Trump has promised steep across-the-board tariffs on imports to the United States, with a particularly significant tax on goods coming from China. One US company, just two days after Trump’s reelection, says it isn’t wasting time getting out of China.

President-elect Donald Trump has promised steep across-the-board tariffs on imports to the United States, with a particularly significant tax on goods coming from China. One US company, just two days after Trump’s reelection, says it isn’t wasting time getting out of China. Steve Madden, a $3 billion shoe company, announced Thursday that it would rapidly halve its Chinese production to avoid Trump’s tariffs. Those plans have been in place for a long time, in anticipation of a Trump victory, according to Steve Madden’s CEO Edward Rosenfeld. “We have been planning for a potential scenario in which we would have to move goods out of China more quickly,” Rosenfeld told Wall Street analysts Thursday. “And so, as of yesterday morning, we are putting that plan into motion. And you should expect to see the percentage of goods that we sourced from China to begin to come down more rapidly going forward.” Like all footwear companies, the majority – about two-thirds – of Steve Madden’s business relies on goods that are imported to the United States, the company noted. And of those imports, 70% are from China. So that’s a lot of rejiggering to do. That’s why Rosenfeld said the company worked for many years to get a new network of factories in place that would allow the company to continue to do business without paying that hefty China tariff that Trump has said could be upwards of 60%. That’s larger than the various tariffs on Chinese goods Trump imposed in his first term – and President Joe Biden largely kept in place – that ranged from 30% to 50%. The point of tariffs, in theory, is to incentivize US manufacturing by making imported goods comparatively more expensive to made-in-the-USA stuff. But here’s the catch: Steve Madden isn’t moving its production to the United States. It said it will be sourcing its goods from Cambodia, Vietnam, Mexico, Brazil and some other countries.